Network services are widely deployed and essential in many networks. The services provide a range of functions such as security, wide area network (WAN) acceleration, firewall services, and server load balancing. Service functions that form part of the overall service may be physically located at different points in the network infrastructure, such as the wide area network, data center, campus, and so forth.
Current network service deployment models are relatively static, and bound to topology for insertion and policy selection. Furthermore, they do not adapt well to elastic service environments enabled by virtualization.
New data center network and cloud architectures require more flexible network service deployment models. Additionally, the transition to virtual platforms requires an agile service insertion model that supports elastic service delivery. The movement of service functions and application workloads in the network and the ability to easily bind service policy to granular information such as per-subscriber state are particularly useful.